


Memories of a Simurgh - Crack ex Machina

by Thinker6



Series: Diabolus ex Machina [2]
Category: Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crack, Gen, Humor, Omake, Side Story, Superheroes, Supervillains
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-05
Updated: 2015-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-10 14:03:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3293075
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thinker6/pseuds/Thinker6
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Memories of a Simurgh Victim", told from the Simurgh's point of view. An omake. Total crack. Not canon for the fic.</p><p>The Simurgh has plans for Brockton Bay! Believe it! The Pretty Soaring Sailor of Love and Justice must race against time to save her beloved city from crippling neuroses, relationship follies, and gauche postmodern architecture.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Helping Hand

12:00 pm

The Simurgh shifted fractionally in her orbit in the thermosphere. Her senses locked onto a target. A locus where several hundreds of thousands of the planet-bound subjects gathered, a hub for transportation routes over land and sea. In the local language, the target was called "Brockton Bay."

The Simurgh studied her target for months, her finely-tuned perceptions searching for vulnerabilities. Charting paths through the vast, branching tree of possible futures. The faultlines where a little push _here_ and another push _just so_ would cause the probabilities of future events to align with her objectives. 

On May 16, 2011, the last stray branches were pruned. The paths converged. The outlines of her desired future took shape.

_Perfect._

The Simurgh entered a dive. Her wings trailed behind her as she accelerated to the Earth far below, like a bullet fired from the heavens.

It was time once again for an earthly hive of scum and villainy to be cleaned up spick and span by a friendly visit from the Pretty Soaring Solider of Love and Justice!

...  
...

The Simurgh descended on Brockton Bay. None of annoying sirens were on yet, thankfully. She had easily outwitted the pathetic surveillance satellites. How stupid were the subjects to trust their surveillance to a tinker construct who was hard-coded with six different perceptual blindspots? Such half-assed security measures stood no chance of stopping the pretty soldier from bringing love and justice to her favorite planet!

The Simurgh took a moment to review her devious plan. Which...wasn't saying much, really. It was a damn simple plan. She had a list of all the nasty woes that afflicted this poor city. She would pop into the city, fix them woe-by-woe, then fly back into orbit and relax with the satisfaction of a job well done.

It was embarrasing to admit, but she had learned through hard experience that she had to keep her plans absolutely dead simple. She had started out with complex, intricate plans weaving the destinies of thousands of subjects, but they...well...they hadn't worked out. To put it mildly. Sometimes she thought it was a cosmic joke. For all that her godlike postcognition and precognition allowed her to theoretically manipulate destinies, her planning ability was absolute crap.

But this time she swore she would make it work. No matter that it hadn't worked in Lausanne. Or London. Or Crimea. Or Madison. Or Canberra, most recently. Unless that Tinker in the quarantine zone ever got his shit together, got over his _stupid_ obsession with turning everyone into combat cyborgs, and got to work saving the endangered species of Madagascar like he was _supposed_ to. 

God. That one hadn't even been a subtle message. She had manipulated the man's brain into a state of high receptiveness to environmental stimuli and then fucking _showered_ him in thirty different species of endangered lemurs. And what did the man start making? Fucking combat cyborgs. 

In retrospect, she should have picked up on the warning signs that the man was cracked in the head. Like his inane naming convention for his inventions. She had made the lemurs using replicas of the man's greatest works, his Put-In-Chicken-Soup-And-In-A-Right-Jiffy-Out-Comes-A-Brand-New-Synthetic-Liver machine and his Put-In-Organic-Matter-And-Guess-What-Comes-Out?-That's-Right-It's-A-Short-Lived-Clone-Of-A-Creature-Of-Your-Choice machine. So yeah, that man had been a little bit batty. But, but! She had spent so much hard work planning, and she had done such a good job of fighting off her opposition, and she had been _so sure_ that she was going to help the subjects properly for once, and....and then it had all come crashing down on her, and, and-

No. The Simurgh cut off that line of thought. Had to keep her spirits up, had to keep a positive attitude. This time, for sure...!

As she began her work in Brockton Bay, she hummed a tune to herself to calm her nerves. A cheerful little ditty about a multiverse collapsing into a singularity and then exploding with force great enough to propel a pair of solar-system sized entities across galaxies. 

The subjects in a mile-wide radius around her simultaneously flinched. Tch. She knew the subjects didn't like her singing very much, but she _needed_ this. It helped her to concentrate. 

Besides, there was such a thing as _tact_. The last time anyone had _politely_ told her that her singing didn't agree with their sensibilities had been during her first concert in Lausanne. Ever since then the subjects preferred to sling juvenile insults, calling her singing a 'blood-curdling scream', a 'hellish cacophany', a 'madwoman's dirge', and so on. And that was when they weren't simply spewing a stream of uncouth vulgarities. So rude! 

Well, she was used to it by now. If the subject's didn't like her singing, that was _their_ problem, not hers. She was self-confident and self-actualized and self-everthing else, so no matter how much they insulted her she wouldn't let it get to her. Really. She wouldn't hold their rudeness against them, not even a teeny little bit. 

Because she was on the side of goodness. And love. And justice. And this time she would do it right.

She was going to help the everloving _fuck_ out of them.

...  
...

There. Look at that utter _travesty_. 

The Simurgh had only been in Brockton Bay for thirty seconds and she already laid eyes on her first target. The place the subjects called "Arcadia High School of Brockton Bay." 

It was all _wrong_. How the hell were the subjects supposed to gain an education in such a frightfully designed place? It would be _far_ more appealing as an N-dimensional fractal torus. She ripped the school grounds apart with her telekinesis, gathering the debris to form a suitable scaffold for her civic revitalization project. 

The Simurgh took a moment to focus with her precog, optimizing the layout of her new-and-improved institute of higher education, and-

Oh fuck! Her precog alerted her to two shard-bearing subjects who were flying in the air above the school, directly in the path of her public works project. What the hell were those two doing up there? Wasn't that awfully hazardous? They might get hurt, or even killed!

The Simurgh studied the shard bearers, using her postcog to view their trigger events and thus identify their shards. Aha. The one in a modest t-shirt and jeans was the Shaper shard, being carried in the arms of the garishly tarted-up Bling shard. 

Predictable really. The Bling shard was radiating an aura of 'awesomeness' - seriously, 'awesomeness'? So juvenile, Bling. What are you going to give your next bearer, the power to turn into a fucking disco ball that shoots lightsabers? Anyway, Bling's 'awesome' aura was nothing more than a pedestrian manipulation of neurotransmitters in the brainstem and cortex. Yet the Shaper shard was pathetically infatuated by that juvenile trick, turning it's attention to the source of the trashy aura like a flower turning its face to the sun. Pah. For all Shaper's pretentions toward 'high art', it was always 'low art' that held its undivided attention. 

Well, aesthetic quibbles aside, the shard bearers had stupidly put themselves right in the path of her civic improvement project. It was almost as if they had planned this, _purposefully_ gotten in the way just to ruin her day. Didn't they value their own lives? Crap, crap crap. 

The Simurgh used her precog to track their future trajectories so that she could make a plan to save them. In unconscious response, her levitated cloud of debris shifted to follow the locus of her attention, unerringly following the subjects as they flew through the air. Crap!

The Simurgh lashed out with her telekinesis, pushing as much of her cloud of debris out of the way as she could. But it was hopeless. As crappy as her planning ability was, she had to admit that her telekinetic control was even worse. Build a N-dimensional fractal torus, easy as pie. Build it _here_ rather than _there_? Or build it out of _this_ material rather than _that_? Or - and this was the hardest part by far, for some ineffable reason - build it _without_ creating a storm of debris that killed and maimed hundreds of bystanders? Well, that was practically impossible.

The two shard bearers were certain to take a hit, especially given the way that they were dancing about in the air like a pair of crazed loons. She would have to save them by guiding them to a safe landing on a protective cushion. Ah, there. She directed her telekinesis to the roof of the school gymnasium and ripped it off its foundations, pulling the roof up in the air to intercept the subjects.

Now, she wasn't _stupid_. After her first few hundred accidents, she had learned that subjects could get hurt by being thrown into roofs. So she worked carefully to protect the flying duo, using her precog to find a future where her butterfingered telekinesis would somehow manage to leave the pair without any lasting physical damage.

Aha. An acceptable future. The Bling bearer would get brain damage, but the Shaper bearer would heal her up in short order, as good as new. Mostly. Essentially. Well, whatever. Close enough.

...whoa, wait just a minute! Now that she inspected that future more closely, it seemed that the Shaper would heal up the Bling bearer _better_ than new. An exceedingly high probability of enhanced affection, affinity, affiliation, affirmation - in short, _love_ \- between the two shard bearers in the future. Yay! That future was a keeper. 

No sooner had she chosen the future than her postcog informed her that the shard bearers had just been knocked out of the sky with a satisfying smack. Yes, my dear little shard-bearing subjects! Get smacked in the head by my elegantly crafted cushion of metal in the name of love and justice! Through my devious manipulation of fate, you'll find your future looking up before you even know it! Believe it!

The Simurgh would have smiled, if she was the type to smile. She was _helping_. With a song in her heart, she turned to her next target.


	2. Helping out Downtown!

12:10 pm

The Pretty Soaring Sailor of Love and Justice, known to earth-crawling subjects as the Simurgh, flew toward Downtown Brockton Bay. Her wingtips twitched with eagerness to cure ills and right woes. 

This _dreadful_ city was filled with heart-rending tales of misery. Streets ridden with crime, families rended by conflict, sky-high unemployment, and - worst of all - unsightly, ill-conceived 'postmodern' architecture that was so out of date it would have been gauche in the fucking _stone age_. But not for much longer. Not if she had anything to say about it!

Ah, here. The next item on her woe list. The Forsberg Gallery. Darling of the local intelligentsia, a feat of cunning architecture designed by the wisest scholars of art to inspire onlookers to reach new heights of imagination, creativity, and appreciation for the sublime. If by 'high art' one meant _pedestrian swill_ and by 'inspire' one meant _abolish all rational thought with the jarring sight of a gargantuan half-finished game of Jenga_. Derivative ultrakitsch nonsense, absolute garbage.

The Simurgh sent a single command to her prodigious mental powers:

_Telekinesis: Disassemble!_

The top ten stories of a nearby building ripped off their moorings and crashed into the Forsberg Gallery, crushing its top floors and sending a rain of debris onto the streets.

The Simurgh would have frowned, if she was the type to frown. She had _hoped_ her telekinesis would precisely 'slide out' the fifth and ninth wings of the building - the middle Jenga pieces, if you will - thus causing the entire building to collapse in an ironically appropriate manner. But, well. Butterfingers.

The Simurgh moved on to the third item on her woe list. Ah, right here, buried in a vault underneath a nearby construction site. Her target this time was a poor shard-bearing subject who had a defective connection to the Splitter shard, and had therefore become a very big, very hungry, very angry subject.

Her heart went out to the poor Splitter-bearing subject. Her precog told her that the subject was far, _far_ too angsty and withdrawn, with an unacceptably high probability of ignoring the Simurgh's visit entirely. The subject would simply stay inside her vault and _sulk_ , interrupted only by occasional bouts of - the Simurgh internally winced - extremely rude commentary about her singing voice. God, everyone's a critic.

The poor subject didn't realize that her behavior was counterproductive, a toxic reaction to her perceived lack of aesthetic appeal. Hadn't the subject ever heard of the phrase, 'Big is Beautiful'? She was isolating herself - locking herself in an underground vault, for fuck's sake! - when what she really needed was _friends_ to make her feel better. Lots and lots and lots of friends.

Now, the Simurgh didn't like to _control_ people, to _force_ them to be someone's friends. Perish the thought! That would be a violation of the subjects at the most fundamental level, tantamount to interfering with their _free will_.

But the Simurgh's precognition guaranteed that, _if only_ the Splitter-bearing subject could be convinced to take a walk outside and get some fresh air, her Splitter power to generate clones would quickly provide her with tons of friends! Tens, hundreds, or even - in some futures - _thousands_ of new friends!

Conveniently, her precog also informed her that the Splitter-bearer was practically raring at the bit to go outside, held back only by her unfortunate neuroses. All the subject needed was a friendly nudge from a Pretty Soaring Soldier of Love and Justice who happened to be in the neighborhood. Open the door to the vault, put a convenient hole in the top of the base for the subject to jump out, and voila! Friend city!

As the Simurgh got to work with her telekinesis, she noticed a very odd coincidence. The subject was connected to the _very same_ Splitter shard as that ill-fated Tinker from her recent visit to Canberra. Hell, the two subjects had practically identical powers - the Brockton Bay subject would have fit right in with the Canberra subject's inventions. He probably would have prized her as his finest creation, and named her the Put-In-A-Creature-Of-Your-Choice-And-Out-Will-Come-That-Very-Same-Creature-Plus---And-This-Is-The-Good-Part---A-Slightly-Modified-Clone machine.

In fact, now that the Simurgh thought about it, she could have sworn that she had seen that very same Splitter shard connected to more than ten other subjects on her previous visits to her favorite planet. So many simultaneous connections from a single shard scattered across the world...very odd, very odd indeed. 

It was almost as if - and this was a _crazy_ idea, mind you - almost as if some vast, secret conspiracy had hijacked the cycle and was using the blood of an Entity's avatar to connect shards to arbitrary hosts, leading to deviant outcomes.

The Simurgh considered the idea, then dismissed it. An unlikely fantasy, almost outside the realm of possibility. She was probably imagining things again. Like the suitcase of vials of an Entity's blood that she thought she had caught a glimpse of in Madison, before she had been distracted by an incoming Zion to the face. 

God. Madison had been one of her worst blunders. She had panicked in the face of Zion's attack and threw together a makeshift dimensional portal to escape, but the damned thing got stuck in the 'suction' setting and spewed out tons of buildings and infrastructure from some random dimension and sent a hundred-odd shard bearing subjects flying through the air to their horrible deaths. That had been _so_ embarassing. She had only been able to shut off the portal with Zion's help. Then she had tried to thank Zion for helping her out of that mess, only to receive his usual reply of a maximized disintegration beam to the face. 

Honestly, that man.

Well, no worries about a disaster like that happening this time. She was better at planning, now. She wouldn't let Brockton Bay become another Madison disaster. Absolutely not.

Hmm, now that her mind was on her Madison visit, she noticed another oddity. The Splitter-bearing subject she was helping vaguely reminded her of one of the subjects she had tried to help back in Madison. Ah, that's right. The young subject from Earth Aleph who had a problem with bulimia, literally vomiting away her pounds to keep herself thin. The Simurgh had pulled a few strings to solve that problem by dumping a pile of computer devices on the subject's stomach, which in turn caused the subject to get surgery on her intestines, which in turn - the Simurgh's precog assured her - would ensure that the subject would never again be physically harmed by eating too much. The Simurgh had considered that good deed the high point of her visit. The rest of her trip had been a disaster, but she had taken solace in the fact that at least _one_ subject's life had been brightened up by a dash of custom-tailored love and justice.

It would be absolutely bizarre if the same subject had cropped up here in Brockton Bay. The Simurgh considered checking it with her postcog to be sure, but...nah. The resemblance was probably a coincidence. The big, hungry, angry subject in the vault _vaguely_ resembled the bulimic from Madison, true, but they couldn't possibly be the same person. They lived in different dimensions, for goodness sake! They were probably just alternate-dimensional counterparts, or something equally unremarkable.

The Simurgh chastised herself for imagining things, and moved on to the next item on her woe list. 

...  
...

Aha, _there_ you are.

Months ago, the Simurgh's senses had detected that the Administrator shard-bearing subject would become obsessed with freeing the Observer shard-bearing subject from imprisonment at the hands of the What-If shard-bearing subject. The Administrator was uncharacteristically reluctant to take action against What-If. But all she needed was a friendly nudge! The Simurgh's precog told her that simply by her own act of arriving in the sky above Brockton Bay, the Simurgh raised the Administrator's probability of action to a near certainty.

The Simurgh loved to do this. Helping subjects solve their problems through self-actualization. Go, little shard-bearing subject! All you have to do is be true to yourself, resolve to be the very best that you can be, and success will surely follow! Throw away your hesitation! Reach out and grasp that bright future that lies right before your eyes!

Of course, self-actualization was never easy. The Simurgh's precog told her that the Administrator bearer would have a hard time convincing the What-If bearer to give away the secret password. But that was no problem to fix. The Simurgh scheduled a vision to be sent into the Administrator's mind in the near future. Reminding the subject of her valiant motivations, of how bad it was to be a villain when you could just choose to be a hero instead!

Excellent. Her precog confirmed it. Thanks to the backup of a certain Pretty Soaring Soldier of Love and Justice, the Administrator bearer would overwhelm the What-If bearer with a wave of heroic charisma and make him release the Observer-bearer from a horrible fate of servitude! 

And no problems at all would come from that. Nothing bad would happen. Everything would be fine. Absolutely, completely, totally _fine_.

Well...it couldn't hurt to check to make double-sure. The Simurgh peered further into the Administrator's future. Let's see. After convincing the What-If bearer, the subject was going to get out of the base. Then she was going to...

...the Simurgh was rudely interrupted by an alert from her precog, warning her of an incoming volley of twenty surface-to-air missiles to the face. 

_Goddamn it._ She couldn't do her work for _five fucking minutes_ without getting shot with missiles. It was getting worse every year.

The Simurgh dodged the missiles, moving with inhuman grace and beauty and panache and elegance and lots of other pretty things, as befitted a Pretty Soaring Soldier of Love and Justice. After a moment's thought, she purposefully allowed one missile hit the tip of one of her wings. The missile exploded with force equivalent to tons of dynamite, damaging her not at all. A small demonstration to to remind the subjects that _look, see, your stupid missiles don't hurt me at all, so stop shooting me and let me get to work, I'm trying to help you out here you pack of unbelievable nutjobs!_

But no, they weren't listening to the voice of reason. Her precog sense predicted another twenty missiles to the face, then another twenty, and then another, and so on ad infinitum until she flew out into the bay and beat the crap out of them.

The Simurgh would have sighed, if she was the type to sigh. She truly abhorred violence, but sometimes you just _had_ to rough the subjects up a little to get a message across. For the greater good.

She set a course for the bay, conscientiously redirecting a missile into the underground base to open up an easy exit for the big, hungry, angry Splitter bearing subject. After a moment of thought, she redirected a few more missiles to seal off all of the base's small exit passages. Best to make sure the subjects took the nice big exit on top of the base, instead of getting stuck in all those twisty small ones.


	3. Helping is Hard!

12:53 pm

The Pretty Soaring Soldier of Love and Justice was feeling pretty good about herself. She was already halfway through the fifteenth item on her list: the renovation project to make the Captain's Hill Memorial less of a disgrace to postmodern architecture. The Memorial hadn't been built yet, of course, but her precog informed her that the Memorial _would_ be built on Captain's Hill shortly after her visit. Memorializing thousands of subjects who all died on the same day in some unaccountable disaster. 

Which was odd, because logically speaking, didn't the future existence of the Memorial imply that there was a deadly disaster occurring _right at this very moment_ , in the middle of her visit, somewhere in Brockton Bay? She did a quick wide-area scan of the city with her precog and postcog, but apart from her own visit she didn't sense anything out of the ordinary. A shame. It seemed that today's 'disaster' that would be commemorated by the Memorial was simply another one of the bizarre delusions she had come to expect from the subjects.

The Simurgh paused her renovations for a few seconds to check in on the Shaper-bearing and Bling-bearing subjects she had helped out at the start of her visit. Ah, her postcog informed her that all had gone according to plan. The Shaper had nicely healed up the Bling-bearing subject's brain, and the pair had made a beeline for the city limits. Flying off into the sunset to enjoy the life of love and happiness they richly deserved. 

A warm and fuzzy feeling surged through the Simurgh's mind. Satisfaction at a job well done.

Oh, and wasn't that adorable! The pair had engaged in verbal interactions with a third individual, a Splitter clone of their mutual parent-subject. The clone parent-subject was a shard bearer, too, connected to another shard from the Bling shard family. As such, her power was-

 _Pffft!_ The Simurgh would have laughed, if she was the type to laugh. The Bling shard had actually done it. It had actually given the poor parent-subject the power to turn into an invulnerable fucking disco ball that swung fucking _lightsabers_. So juvenile, Bling. So. Juvenile.

Wait! Something had gone terribly wrong! The clone parent-subject Bling bearer spoke a stream of exceptionally harsh words, and the child Bling and the Shaper suffered increasing levels of emotional distress! The Shaper bearer had even gone into shell shock!

What the hell was wrong with the clone parent-subject? The Simurgh didn't understand inter-subject relationships quite as well as she'd like, but wasn't the parent-subject supposed to be their _caretaker_ of a sort? The parent-subject was supposed to be giving the child-subjects love and justice, not hatred and woe!

The Simurgh would have facepalmed, if she was the type to facepalm. God, this _always_ happened. Her plans always turned out so much worse than she expected. It was as if fate was conspiring against her. 

Well, she wouldn't let it get her down. It wasn't like it was her _fault_. With all those clones out there, it stood to reason that one or two of them would inevitably turn out psycho. There was a bad apple in every bunch. 

At least the other hundred-odd clones were probably fine.

In any case, she would make up for her mistake right away. No need to worry, poor little shard bearing subjects! The Pretty Soaring Soldier of Love and Justice was on the job! She'd help you right out and fix everything good as new in a jiffy.

The Simurgh began activating memories in the Bling bearer's mind, giving her instructive hallucinations to bolster her spirit and guide her to a positive resolution of her conflict with the clone parent-subject. While the hallucinations were reactivations of the subject's vivid, complex memories, she kept her messages almost insultingly plain and simple, easy for even a mentally challenged subject to understand:

> "The Shaper is in a pinch! Protect her! Don't let the clone parent-subject hurt her!"
> 
> "That clone parent-subject is a _very bad_ parent-subject! Stop her!"
> 
> "No, no, don't give in to hate! You love the Shaper! Use the power of love!"

There. That should do it. The child subjects would be safe, and-...wait. 

Crap! Another threat! Her precog alerted her to a high probability that the poor child subjects would soon be _ruthlessly assasinated_ by the Protectorate subjects. What the hell! The Protectorate subjects were supposed to be the _comrades_ of the child subjects, not their murderers!

It was bizarre. Her power _theoretically_ gave her the power to manipulate the fates of chosen individuals to ensure their maximum happiness and satisfaction. Yet with every year, the subjects she tried to help were invariably targeted by increasingly powerful and elaborate conspiracies to end their lives, often betrayed in _minutes_ by the very people who were supposed to protect them! It took increasingly large amounts of her tender love and care to keep her helpees alive for a single day, let alone to grant them the full and happy lives they deserved.

God. These mind games were so overcomplicated and tiresome. It would be one thing if she _liked_ the byzantine manipulation games the subjects insisted on dragging her into. But she had never liked politics. One reason why she spent more than 99% of her time in orbit.

No, the Simurgh preferred to handle things in a simple and direct way, without unnecessary subtlety and machinations. So she scheduled a single, simple nudge to be sent into the Bling-bearing child's brain:

> "People who try to kill you are bad! Don't trust them!"

There. Simple, direct, to the point. Common sense, really. Solid advice for any situation. There was no way the Bling bearing subject could possibly misinterpret that.

Admittedly, she didn't have time to tailor the hallucinations precisely. Her precog assured her that they increased the probability of acceptable futures by a large margin, so the subjects were _probably_ okay, but still, it couldn't hurt to check those futures more carefully...

Crap! _Yet another_ threat! In a large percentage of those futures, the Shaper-bearer started verbal interactions with the Bling-bearer that led to suboptimal outcomes. The timing wasn't consistent - sometimes minutes, or hours, or days later - but when it happened there was a high chance of broken affiliations, broken bodies, broken minds, broken _love_!

Unbelievable. Fucking unbelievable. She saved them from their crazy parent-subject, she saved them from their crazy comrade-subjects, and now she had to save them from their crazy own stupid selves! God, what was _wrong_ with these child-subjects? Why did _everything_ with these people have to be a federal fucking issue!

It was as if those two child-subjects had been placed in this miserable city for the sole purpose of making each other miserable, and frustrating the kind-hearted souls who tried to help them. Putting themselves in peril to attract her attention, pretending to be salvagable, and then insistently dooming themselves in increasingly horrible ways no matter how much of a labor of love she put into protecting them.

Well, you know what? If _that's_ the way they wanted to play it, she would make an exception, just for them. She would use her precog to grab hold of their destinies and doom them to the worst possible fate. Condemn them to a life of misery in an ironic hell of their own making, all the while convinced to the core of their souls that they were living out a happy ending. The Simurgh turned her attention to the child-subjects, to their futures, and opened her mouth to let out a _scream-_

No. 

Calm down. 

Just relax.

It's not so bad.

Everything is fine.

Don't hurt the poor subjects. 

Not even a little bit.

Remember your mission.

You're on the side of Goodness. 

Love. 

Justice. 

Yes.

The Simurgh closed her mouth. She would have sighed, if she was the type to sigh. Fine. She would help them. She guessed. But only because she was a literal fucking _angel_.

The Simurgh used her postcog on the child Shaper-bearing subject and found her most recent memory of giving tender love and care to the child Bling-bearing subject. There, the brain-healing from mere minutes ago. The Simurgh then scheduled a series of unrelenting hallucinations to bring that memory to the forefront of the Shaper-bearer's mind, over and over again, until the subject got the point that she needed to treat her true love _right_.

> "You love the Bling! Remember how you healed her brain!"
> 
> "You love the Bling! Remember how you healed her brain!"
> 
> "You love the Bling! Remember how you healed her brain!"
> 
> "You love the Bling! Remember how you healed her brain!"
> 
> "You love the Bling! Remember how you healed her brain!"
> 
> "You love the Bling! Remember how you healed her brain!"

And so on. Her precog informed her that the hallucination had to be replayed nearly thirty times in the Shaper-bearer's mind before the subject got the point and stopped engaging in the ruinous verbal interaction that threatened to sabotage her love with the Bling-bearer. Amazingly stubborn and dense, even for a subject, but she would yield in the end.

...strange. With each repetition, the subject's outcomes improved, yet the hallucination become harder and harder to trigger, more dissociated from the rest of the subject's brain. As if the subject was _rejecting_ the memory, rather than accepting it like she was supposed to. Very suspicious. Had the amazingly dense Shaper-bearing subject found _yet another_ creative way to twist the Simurgh's good-hearted interventions into perverse negative outcomes? The Simurgh focused on those futures to check...

...but at that moment she was hit in the face with a kaleidoscopic storm of laser beams and hard-light constructs, glowing in all the hues of the rainbow with absolutely _no_ color coordination at all, like a bouquet of out-of-season flowers picked by a colorblind florist, scattering their lurid petals through the air in a trashy display of absolute garbage.

Goddamn it. She had let the Splitter shard make _far_ too many clones of the Bling bearers. She was barely able to see five minutes into the future with this much Bling in her face, the glare was truly astounding.

You know what? That did it.

She could take the continual waves of self-doubt due to her unaccountable lack of success at helping the subjects. She could take the chorus of criticism about her singing, even when it devolved into uncouth insults and rude gestures. She could take the borderline suicidal subjects who rejected her help and insisted on dooming themselves in ever more creative ways. She could even take the brutal assault from the shard-bearing subjects, who constantly beseiged her for no good reason at all.

But this uninspired hackwork, this artistically bankrupt garbage, this _complete and utter lack of consideration for every principle of aesthetics!_ This was beyond the pale. She would not, _could not_ , let this stand. 

It was time to get serious. It was time to show the subjects her true power. 

The Simurgh would have grinned a vicious grin, if she was the type to grin.

It was time to initiate _maximum helping_.


End file.
